Pratt sat and looked at me.
"The noise was significant," I said. "My neighbor knocked on the wall. My other neighbor knocked on the ceiling, and then my phone rang. It was my landlord asking if I was alright." I looked back at Pratt. "I answered it."
"You answered it?"
"I answered it," I said. "I said that I was fine and had just dropped a few things. The guy was absolutely gone by then. He couldn't recover. We ended up ordering pizza and reading the backs of the fallen books for an hour. It was a great night."
Pratt climbed onto the bed, reached out with one arm, and dragged me into the middle of the bed with him. "Sully," he said.
"Yeah?"
"Stop talking."
I opened my mouth.
He cut the words off by kissing me.
It was a fully committed, tongues dancing, kiss. He lay on my chest with me flat on my back. His heart was already pounding against my chest.
"The cat," he said, "had better judgment than you're giving it credit for."
I laughed, and he rolled onto his side, still facing me. "Naked?" he asked.
"There's no way to say no to that."
We both removed the rest of our articles of clothing and climbed under the sheets facing each other, close enough that I could feel his breath.
An old instinct surfaced. Speed up, introduce momentum, keep the moment from sitting still long enough to become something I'd have to feel all the way through.
I didn't move.
"Stay with me," I said.
"I'm here."
We'd done this enough times that I knew the broad strokes—what Pratt would do first and the intensity of his gaze. What I hadn't accounted for was how different it felt when I wasn't trying to manage any of it. I relaxed into the room and Pratt's hands. As every sports announcer pointed out, he had extremely good hands.
He moved with the same deliberation he brought to everything. No wasted motion. He approached intimacy the way he owned the crease: patient, angle-driven, and leaving nothing to chance.
At some point, he reached for the nightstand drawer. He located what he needed without looking, and had the condom dealt with in approximately four seconds. I timed it involuntarily. I have a bartender's sense of elapsed time, and I cannot turn it off.
"You're thinking something," he said.
"I'm always thinking something."
"Say it."
"You opened that drawer," I said, "like you knew exactly where everything was."
"I did know exactly where everything was."
"You organized my nightstand?"
A pause. "While you were in the shower one morning. The configuration was inefficient."
I opened my mouth. He put his hand over it in a kindly way.
"Later," he said.
